Archive | August, 2011

Show of the Day: Time Trax

5 Aug

Show of the Day:

Originally, I figured I’d highlight mostly little-known or relatively obscure shows in this feature, but I want to leave the door open in case I have an itch to scratch about a more popular show for whatever reason.  Here’s the first entry:

Time Trax

This entry is a tribute to my friend, who has a healthy love of all things time travel-related, and is singularly obsessed with a show called Time Trax (obsession is relative – for a show of Time Trax’s level of popularity I consider owning and having seen all the episodes multiple times as obsessed)..

Time Trax ran two seasons, from January 1993 to December 1994, for a grand total of 44 episodes.  The basic plot is as follows – Darien Lambert is a police detective in 2193, two hundred years in the future, in a world where everyone is fitter, smarter, and generally more attractive, due to some sort of Gattica-like natural selection, or something less dystopian – it’s unclear and not really important, though it is noted that white people are in the minority, and “blanco” is a vicious racial slur.  Lambert is portrayed by Dale Midkiff, a TV veteran who has bounced around a bit, and might be best known for starring in Pet Semetary.  The villainous Dr. Mordecai Sahmbi, played by Peter Donat, possibly best known for his role as Fox Mulder’s dad in the X-Files, is a brilliant scientist who has invented a form of time travel technology, and springs a whole bunch of criminals from jail, and sends them back to 1993, where their knowledge and genetic superiority could enable them to take over the world.  Lambert must go back in time to 1993 himself to apprehend the fugitives, at a pace of something like one a week, and send them back to the future where jails can handle them.

Lambert doesn’t have to do it alone, however.  He’s always guided by his handy hologram Australian guide, SELMA(short for Specified Encapsulated Limitless Memory Archive) – kind of his equivalent of Al, from Quantum Leap.  (The show even has an opening narration which is similar to Leap’s).  She’s a computer, but seems to have feelings, and has a motherly relationship with Lambert, who she councils and finds out information for (plane times, crazy things about 1993 with which Lambert is unfamiliar).  Lambert uses his knowledge of martial art Mosh-T, which is a combination of the most effective techniques of martial arts of the past, and the 22nd century’s standard police weapon – an MPPT, or Micro-Pellet Projection Tube, which, although it looks like a mere keyless car remote, is capable of capturing a fugitive in a field of energy, paralyzing him and making it possible to send him back to the future.  (The plot is kind of a reverse Brimstone, an even shorter lived obscure show, which may well be worth its own entry in the future).

Persuaded by my friend, I have seen a number of episodes.  The two I remember most, aside from the pilot, which featured Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s Mia Sara as a young prodigy who evil Sahmbi is obsessed with, are The Prodigy, which featured a young Rider Strong (of Boy Meets World fame) and Beautiful Songbird, which deals with Lambert trying to protect a young country singer, who he knows will go on to become famous, from a future criminal.  Time Trax was apparently unsuccessful enough to be last new production of Lorimar Productions, which was behind a number of successful shows, including Eight is Enough and TGIF standards Full House, Perfect Strangers, and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper.  It was successful enough, however, to inspire a truly terrible Super Nintendo game.

I never quite figured out why my friend has such an abiding love for the show, aside from simply the fact it had time travel, but it was by no means a bad show, and certainly deserves a little rememberance.

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Breaking Bad – Season 4, Episode 2: Thirty-Eight Snub

4 Aug

My brother’s one major complaint about Breaking Bad (he still loves the show) is its occasional slow pacing and inconsequential scenes.  While I prefer to describe the pace as deliberate rather than slow, he’s not entirely wrong.  What I always tell him,though, is that the genius of Breaking Bad is that some scenes transcend the plot and the episodes in which they’re found.  Even by themselves, as scenes, or vignettes, or whatever you’d like to call them, they stand out as brilliant and compelling. The scene with Mike and Walter at the bar was one of these scenes.  The plot implications of the scene were certainly important, but even without, the scene was wonderful.

Stepping back, we have two main plotlines in this episode, and two minor ones.  Walt and Jesse are both reacting to their new lease on life differently.  Walt is paranoid that if he doesn’t take out Gus, somehow, Gus will be taking him out soon enough.  He shows off some of Walt’s classic characteristics such as naiveté, impulsiveness, and thinking that he’s cleverer than he is, when he buys a gun illegally in a great cold open, and then tries first to go right up to Gus’s house with a piece.  After that fails miserably, letting Gus know what Walter had in mind if Gus didn’t already,  Walt, in the above-noted best scene of the week, tries to talk Mike into letting Walt kill Gus.  Walt is smart, and he is bold, and both of these are two attributes are to his credit, but he’s so far out of his league at this point that it makes you wonder how he’s going to avoid getting killed.  At the same time, even though Mike responds to Walt’s request with a well-earned beatdown, Mike must be wondering how long he ought to deal with Gus – even battle-tested Mike appeared shocked when Gus killed Victor violently in the first episode.

Jesse is still dealing with killing Gail, watching Gus kill Victor and with coming close to being killed himself .  His way of dealing is to do a bunch of drugs and try to constantly surround himself with people.  It’s hard not to feel for him when everyone, even Badger and Skinny Pete, go home after a couple of days of partying – even they need to rest.

I also like the short Marie and Hank scenes with the physical therapist and then with the rocks.  The physical therapist scene is the first strong indication of the current problems with the marriage – previously it seemed as if Hank was miserable all the time, with his condition, but he’s totally inspired when the therapist is there, and then comes down again when he leaves.  Marie is only half joking when she asks the physical therapist to move in.  It’s one of the first times we really feel for Marie, who has been one of the less likable characters in the show up to this point – here, she’s doing everything she absolutely can for Hank, and he’s still unappreciative.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch: 34 – Glee

4 Aug


GLEEEEEE

This was the most debatable entry on my list – I watched the entire first season, and the first few episodes of the second, but kept delaying watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show tribute episode because I’ve never had all that much love for Rocky Horror, and Glee was already going in the wrong direction.  I originally intended to watch it and catch up but as time went forward and I fell more and more episodes behind, I found myself not really wanting to watch it.  I started viewing it as a chore more than as entertainment, which is probably the ultimate bad sign for a show.  I think I even loaded an episode once or twice and hulu and then switched to something else before watching.

It’s pretty easy to explain why Glee has gone downhill ever since the first half of its first season.  The musical sequences have always been excellent.  I haven’t always enjoyed their versions of songs, but the quality and production values are always top notch and the choreography is very well done.  The other elements that make up a show have changed, however and Glee hasn’t decided exactly what type of show it wants to be.

When I started watching, I told people that if you knew Glee just for the music, you were missing the point;  there was a lot more going on.  Watching those first episodes, I was tempted to skip the songs.  It was a smart high school satire with a couple of absurd soapy plots arcs which were set up in the first couple of episodes and paced out throughout the first half of the season.  The two most important were main teacher Will’s wife claiming to be pregnant, but lying about it, and the pregnancy of head cheerleader Quinn, who was both trying to keep the pregnancy a secret and lying about who the father was.

Current Glee has lost it’s way and here’s why.  While that first half of the first season appeared to be plotted ahead of time, later plots seamed to be ramshackle and written on the fly.  Some episodes started what seemed like a major plot, and then the show would just forget about it, or remember it five episodes later in a different form.  There was no plan and the writers seemed to be making it as they went along.  Second, there was no consistency within the characters.  Cheerleader Quinn is probably the best example of this – her personality changed depending on what the week’s episode needed her to be to tell it’s story.  One week she was learned and wise after having to deal with the exclusion of  being pregnant in high school, and the next week she was a catty cheerleader again, and these traded off with a few other personality traits thrown in occasionally.  The show feels stale and misguided just a year after it started, which is sad, because it really is a good idea.

It’s not easy to keep writing new interesting plots without being repetitive.  Making later seasons of televisions are more difficult than early ones because you have to tell something new without treading old ground, but you’ve formed limits to what you can do by the plots and characters you’ve built in the past.  That said, some shows just aren’t up to the task of lasting, and it’s too bad.  Glee appears to be one of them.

Why It’s This High:  I kind of watch it, or watched it until recently, so that’s why it’s on the list at all

Why It’s Not Higher:  It’s no longer good

Best episode of the most recent season:  I’m limited but what I’ve seen, but I’ll pick “Britney/Brittany” because it gave focus to one of the better characters, the slow-witted Brittany, and there were some pretty good Brittany Spears sequences. Although other parts of the episode were kind of stupid, that’s the case in just about all of them.

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The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame

3 Aug

Mr. Zeljko Ivanek himself

This feature is dedicated to honoring the great TV actors. Some of them will be “that guys” , actors you see in an episode of Law & Order or your favorite show, and you can’t put a finger on what his or her name is, but you know you’ve seen them all over the place.  Some of them may be a bit bigger, because, after all, I want to offer equal opportunity.   Whoever I choose, though, their patron saint will be the great television actor Zeljko Ivanek, after whom this feature is named.

It would be a stretch to say that Zeljko Ivanek, a 53-year old actor from Slovenia, appeared in all of the most culturally relevant television dramas of the past ten years, but not much of one.  He got his television career underway in the 1980s, appearing in single episodes of St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law, but his TV career really took off with his recurring role as prosecuting attorney Ed Danvers in Homicide: Life on the Street in the mid-’90s.  During his time on Homicide, he guested in a season one episode of X-Files as Roland (the title of the episode as well), a seemingly mentally disabled janitor accused of killing scientists who work at the lab he cleans.  While the episode is not necessarily regarded as a classic, his performance is unsurprisingly well regarded.  He played some roles in films, and while, for an actor with less work I would spend some time discussing these films, if I didn’t edit Zeljko’s career I could go on forever.  He appeared in single episodes of Frasier, Murder She Wrote, Chicago Hope and Millennium in the second half of the ’90s.  He next worked with Homicide creator Tom Fontana on Oz, as the evil (well, Republican, so close enough) governor who appears in several episodes of the show over the years, wanting to dispense tough justice, death penalties, and possibly consider Warden Ernie Hudson for Lieutenant Governor (the warden of a jail as second in command of a state?  Yeah, I didn’t think it seemed plausible either).  During his time on Oz, he played astronaut Ken Mattingly (portrayed by Gary Sinise in Apollo 13) in the Tom Hanks and Ron Howard produced HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.

He was just getting warmed up.  He appared in Law & Order as his Homicide character, and also appeared in two other episodes 11 years apart (one in a Jim McGreevey take off as a contractor who had a gay affair with the governor of Connecticut) and a Law & Order SVU, as well as an ER, and an episode of the short-lived Dennis Leary show The Job.  He was still just getting warmed up.  He appeared in a recurring role in the first season of 24 as Andre Drazen,  the smarter of two brothers who are both sons of main season 1 villain Dennis Hopper, who Drazen and his brother manage to spring from a top security prison.  He appeared in two season 5 West Wing episodes as a staffer for temporary president Speaker of the House John Goodman.  After a CSI, an NYPD Blue (late in the series’ run) and a couple episodes of the two season James Woods show Shark, he appeared in Lost, as Juliet’s jerk of a boss who mysteriously gets run over by a bus.  He played founding father John Dickinson in HBO’s John Adams miniseries and a gun-wielding sick man who takes the ward hostage in a 2008 House episode.

Now, the offers started pouring in.  In Big Love, he plays a domineering ex-husband of Chloe Sevigny’s Nicki. In Heroes, he portrayed an evil hunter of, well, heroes for about half a season before dying.    In True Blood, he played a kind of evil Magister, a judge  amongst vampires, before dying.  In Damages, he won an Emmy for playing a bad, but not really evil, lawyer for Ted Danson’s character, before dying, by shooting himself in the head in front of Glenn Close.  He most recently starred in The Event as a surprisingly, to everyone, non-evil, presidential adviser.

This is in addition to enough work on Broadway to receive three Tony nominations (even though I haven’t been to a Broadway show in several years, I had the pleasure of seeing him in a revival of The Caine Mutiny Court Trial, for which he was nominated for a lead performance).

Sadly, with The Event’s cancellation, he is temporarily without a home.  But, not for long, I have confidence – for wherever, there is television, there will be Zejlko Ivanek.

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Breaking Bad – Season 4, Episode 1

2 Aug

I’m going to do my own little Breaking Bad recaps here, and since it’s just the third week now, I’m going to run back and give my take on the first two episodes of the fourth season so there’s some sense of full-season completion.

Season 4, Episode 1 – Box Cutter

I wouldn't want to be the guy on the right

Here’s something that Breaking Bad does well.  It takes a situation which could easily be boring and predictable and makes it exciting and tense. In this case, the circumstances at the end of the third season and the beginning of the fourth, where the writers have painted themselves into a corner.  Walt and Jesse’s lives are in extreme danger, yet they can’t kill Walt or Jesse this early in the show’s run without dramatically changing the show.  There is a situation that should have high tension, but you already know how it’s going to end; Gus needs Walt to run his meth lab, and Walt, in turn, says he needs Jesse – and the two of them live.

Even though you know what’s going to happen,  Breaking Bad does a great job of making this predictable set of consequences feel both incredibly tense and completely natural. Based on everything we know about these characters and the circumstances they’re stuck in, this feels like the outcome that would come of it.  Gus needs Walt, as it’s been clearly established that without this lab running at capacity all the time, it’s a giant money sink, which Gus can’t afford.

On top of this, when the show ends, even though the immediate tension of the third season finale has been extinguished, as Walt is no longer less than a minute away from dying, the long-term fourth season tension has been set up. Whenever Gus finds a new cook, which could take a long time, but might not, Walt and Jesse are finished, and they have just that amount of time to figure out a plan.

The episode features a fantastic edge of your seat scene. Gus angrily, but calmly, comes downstairs to the lab to deal with Walt and Jesse after finding out Gale is dead, and then kills Victor, who is trying to prove that Walt is unnecessary by cooking the meth himself.  Gus murders Victor in the most cold-hearted manner, silently with a box cutter as Walt, Jesse and Mike look on.  The exact purpose of the kill is unclear; there are a couple of different possible reasons.  Gus may be punishing Victor for getting seen at Gale’s apartment, or he may be sending a message to Walt and Jesse, telling them that they’re this close to death themselves.  Likely, it’s a combination.  The scene gives us a new appreciation for Gus’s cold business sensibility.  Gus’s murder of Victor was at the least disturbing, maybe borderline sociopathic, and even Mike seemed shocked by the sheer manner of the kill.  Watching Gus clean himself off afterwards was priceless.

The scene ended with a nice touch, showing Jesse and Walt using chemicals to destroy the body.  Mike, looking on, asks if they’re sure their method will work. Jesse and Walt assure Mike that it will, showing us an example of how chemistry and Walt can be as dangerous in its own way as Mike’s time-tested methods.

The police investigate Gale’s murder and we get a tight shot of Gale’s notebook, where Gale stores his notes on the meth-making progress (Gale has always been a diligent student).  Walt will be squeezed from both sides this season.  With Gus coming at him from one side, and the police from the other, the question for the rest of the season is who will get to him first?

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – Honorable Mentions

2 Aug

Ranking the Shows That I Watch

As you may or may not know/realize, I watch a lot of TV.  34 programs in fact, I’ve watched a season of in the past 12 months.  I’d taken it on myself to rank these shows, starting at 34 to 1.  First, however, a look at:

Shows That Came Close But Didn’t Make the Cut

Some brief mentions to shows that, for various reasons, almost made it but didn’t:

I want to watch these soon, but haven’t yet:

Cool jackets, but is the skeleton a bit much?

Sons of Anarchy – I read almost nothing but good things, Ron Perlman is just about always awesome, and it comes from the creator of the Shield, another extremely buzzworthy show I’ve never seen.  Compared to The Shield, this has fewer seasons, making it much faster to watch, and my motorcycling friend watches it and I’m eager to talk with him about it.

Treme – It’s created by David Simon, and it has Bunk and Lester Freeman from The Wire. Oh, and Anthony Bourdain is responsible for writing the restaurant sequences. Do I really need anything else? It’s actually good that I don’t, because aside from the people and the great reviews, the intrinsic plot doesn’t sound all that interesting, at first glance anyway.  I’m sure I’ll regret saying that when I’ve watched it, though.

Men of a Certain Age – I didn’t know what to make of this show when it debuted on TNT, but since then I’ve read nothing but good reviews, and heard nothing but good things. I appreciate that it seems to be a concept and an age range that hasn’t been explored as much, and I’ve loved Andre Braugher ever since Homicide: Life on the Streets.  (Update:  sadly, it’d been cancelled – still, I’ll watch the two seasons that exist.)

I’ve seen these intermittently but not enough to rank them:

Fry and friends

Futurama – I’ve kept up here and there with the new episodes – the quality isn’t quite high enough to draw me in to watch it week in and week out, but I have enough fondness for the show to turn it on when I see it, and since it’s Comedy Central, repeats are not infrequent.

Family Guy – It’s crazy to believe that this show, which was cancelled for a couple of years, is now going on its tenth season. I can’t say that the show is perfect by any means, but what I can say is, due to its disjointed, flashback, plot-light nature, even a bad episode is likely to have two or three hilarious parts. That said, I watch it just here and there and on repeats.

Louie – Allow me to be the one out of the loop for a minute. I watched a few episodes of this last year. It was all right. There were some funny parts, and some not so funny parts. Yet, everywhere I read, the show was a work of true comic genius. I think he’s a decent comic for sure – but in the biz he seems to be regarded as the best, and not close. I’ll try it again, but maybe it’s just not my thing.

I watched these shows, but they ended just before the arbitrary cut off I made for this list:

Are we having fun yet?

Party Down – I’ll be honest, I really just added this section to give a much-needed shout out to Party Down, possibly my favorite show of the last five years, which has a critical acclaim to ratings ratio of infinite (or more like not computable – since the ratings were 0, and we all know you can’t divide by that). It didn’t help that absolutely nobody has Starz. Nonetheless, if you haven’t seen it, watch it now.  It’s on Netflix streaming and DVD.

24 – I was an early adapter to this show when it started, and it will always have a warm place in my heart, but I was a bit tired of it by the end, and I watched only occasionally. That said, even though I was no longer a regular, I still have good feelings towards it, and don’t think it became so terrible or anything, just a little repetitive and lower down on my priority list.

Lost – I was also just about finished with this show by its last season, but with much different feelings than 24 gave me – anger, confusion, and frustration chief among them. I didn’t even watch most of the last season, constantly meaning to catch up but also constantly realizing I didn’t want to; I finally consented to read Wikipedia entries about the episodes and realized how glad I was that I didn’t watch the season.

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Power Rankings: Arrested Development Edition

1 Aug

Here’s a feature which will be regularly displayed weekly which we (the royal we, mostly) call Power Rankings.  Each week, we’ll pick a television show and rank the actors/actresses/contestants/correspondents/etc. based on what they’ve done after the series ended (unless we’re ranking a current series, in which case we’ll have to bend the rules).  Preference will be given to more recent work, but if the work was a long time ago, but much more important/relevant, that will be factored in as well.  And with that, I present:

POWER RANKINGS:  Arrested Development Edition:

  1. Jason Bateman – two years ago this spot would have surely been taken by Michael Cera, but oh, how times have changed.  I submit that no single person benefited more from Arrested Development – outside of an appearance in The Sweetest Thing, Bateman’s career was more or less moribund until the appearance of AD, and while the show failed to crack the commercial mainstream while it was on, the critical buzz combined with the cult formed as the show was ending and after it was over, Bateman’s career was born anew.  Important supporting roles in The Break Up, Juno, Hancock and Up in the Air have led to starring roles in a series of largely mediocre films, such as The Switch, Couples Retreat, The Change Up (which should also be called The Switch, really) and Horrible Bosses.  It’s hard to say where Bateman’s career is headed, if he keeps doing such fare, but right now, he’s starring in movies, some of which are successful, which is more than anyone but the next person on this list can even say, and hey, maybe he can still be the next Paul Rudd.
  1. Michael Cera – how times have changed, part 2.  Just two years ago, Cera was still the clear breakout star of Arrested Development, having leveraged an extremely successful role in the critical and commercial smash Superbad (the beginning, with Knocked Up, of Apatow-mania) and as a supporting character in critical and commercial darling Juno into a position of top billing in movies like Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Year One, Youth in Revolt and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  The last three were more or less flops, though the last two received some positive notice.  Still, it doesn’t seem as if Cera is quite in the position of strength he once was.
  1. Will Arnett – well, his successful turn as G.O.B. Bluth hasn’t quite made him a movie star, but people at least keep trying to make him a television star.  He played supporting roles in a number of movies that weren’t particularly successful, from Let’s Go To Prison, to Blades of Glory, to Hot Rod, to the Brothers Solomon, most of which were tepidly reviewed at best, and not financially successful.  He’s had a little more luck in television, where he’s had a recurring role as Alec Baldwin’s rival, Devan Banks, on 30 Rock, and got his own show written by Mitch Hurwitz, Running Wilde, which was cancelled fairly quickly, but which individually earned him decent enough reviews.  He’s get another shot at it this upcoming fall as one of the stars of Up All Night, working aside Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolph.
  1. Jessica Walter – older actors and actresses are at a disadvantage, compared to their younger brethren, and actresses in particular.  Walter, however, has managed to buck the trend, a little bit anyway, starring in TV Land sitcom Retired at 35 (yes, TV Land has original shows – I can’t imagine how many people actually watched this, but it got picked up for a second season, so that has to say something) and she is a voice regular on FX’s Archer as intelligence agency ISIS’s head, which is only a voice role, but is quite culturally relevant.  Really not bad at all, especially compared to those that come after.
  1. David Cross – unlike the other cast members, Cross has his primary career in stand up comedy to fall back on, even without any acting.  That said, he’s done a bit of acting as well, currently starting in his own sitcom The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, a mildly well reviewed show, co-produced by IFC and the BBC.  He also helped fill the coffers of his bank account with roles in both of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and both of the Kung Fu Panda movies.  In between, he wrote and produced a pilot for Adult Swim called Paid Programming which wasn’t picked up.  He also appeared as a reoccurring character in Will Arnett’s now-cancelled Running Wilde.
  1. Jeffery Tambor – he hasn’t had anything close to a starring role in anything, except for the extremely short-lived sitcom Twenty Good Years (which aired four episodes in the fall of 2006).  That said, he’s gotten relatively steady work, which counts for something.  He’s had voice work in Tangled and Monsters vs. Aliens, and non-voice work in The Invention of Lying, Paul and both Hangovers, as well as a couple of spots in Entourage as a crazy version of himself.
  1. Tony Hale – he’s appeared in a couple of relatively well-known movies, such as Stranger Than Fiction and The Informant!, and a lot more less well-known movies.  In television, he was a series regular in Andy Richter’s second of three attempts at a successful network sitcom, Andy Barker PI, was a reoccurring character on Chuck and on the last season of Numb3rs (I wasn’t initially sure where the 3 went) and an NBC-backed web series called CTRL which I had never heard of before.
  1. Portia de Rossi – she was in 10 episodes of Nip/Tuck and starred in the one season of surprisingly decently reviewed Better Off Ted.  That’s about it.
  1. Alia Shawkat – more projects than de Rossi, but less prominent in those projects.  Her most relevant was probably her role in Whip It, and she had a decent role in The Runaways and in Cedar Rapids.  Then she appeared as a one off in a bunch of TV shows.

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Introduction

1 Aug

Hi!

My name’s Andrew! I look forward to spending some time together with you all.

The blog’s title is taken from this video by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcracy.

This blog will be devoted to all things television – if it airs, it’s free reign for me to talk about. That includes making a little bit of a stretch once in a while, but for the most part, it’s about good ol’ television shows and the people who make them happen.

A little bit of years ago, I won a game show about pop culture, but mostly I’m just a guy who watches a serious amount of television.

I’m going to start out with a couple of features and work from there, but I’d love to hear your input!

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